One of things I missed in Spring Surf are Models and Controllers. I tried many ways to get them working, but still no useful solution. So I chose really simple way to do that – to define another dispatcher and to play with urlrewrite. In this post I’ll describe what I did and as a little bonus you’ll find a breathtaking example 🙂 – YUI based Ajax whisperer.

Now add dispatcher – in web.xml we have to define new servlet with name controller, loaded as second and with url-pattern /app (default dispatcher is mapped to /service), which is filtered by urlrewrite.

In next step we’ll need web application config – Spring names them as -servlet.xml prefixed with servlet name. So let’s create controller-servlet.xml in WEB-INF (in STS New/Spring bean configuration file) and add some useful stuff there: for first we want to use annotations for our controllers, so let’s add there two beans – DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping and AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter.

Okay, folks, that’s almost all! Now the interesting part: Writing the controller. Make a class in package we defined earlier. It should extend some AbstractController or another stuff, but it’s not necessary, we’ll simple it! 😉 Put a test method inside:

Last thing to do is to define some rules for urlrewrite. We’ll try to forward all /app/ requests to our dispatcher and anything else to Default Spring Dispatcher. That’s done by these rules (urlrewrite.xml):

That was the first part – worst one, now came pure fun – some functionality. We want to implement some buzzlike thingy as Autocompletion is – whisperer. To keep it simple our model layer will be just a Collection with Strings, so let’s modify our controller with constructor:

In my last blogpost we got Java backed webscripts working, now let’s try something completely different: defining page snippet as a component in .JSP. Just let’s continue with our last code, which is possible to download, but it’s not necessary, it’s possible to build it all on green meadow (aka after project in roo is created and surf installed).

First thing to do is to add dependency for jstl into Maven’s pom.xml and then update maven dependencies and refresh our project in Eclipse.

Now you can get glue on Spring forums, or trust me and create new component type with JSP Renderer: it’s needed to create new directory – /WEB-INF/classes/surf/site/component-types and inside new component type configuration – test.xml.

At this time we have Freemarker template (test.ftl) and template instance (test.xml) inside directory /WEB-INF/templates. We need to edit those files. First let’s add following code into test.ftl. There are four regions defined – three of them inside template scope (already defined by installation of Surf addon) and one with page scope, which we’ll define and bind later.

As written in roo output, directory test inside pages is created and test.xml within. This file is page configuration and we have to define our content for region defined in template. But not necessary, it’s good idea to check our work now. So let’s try to Run it on server… It’s ugly, but it works! 🙂

First try

That’s cool, but our aim is to create working .jsp page. How to do that? What about simply create that page? 🙂 So let’s create test.jsp inside /WEB-INF/pages/test and fill it with some simple code:

That’s our page. Now we need to connect it with previously created component type – /WEB-INF/classes/surf/site/component-types/test.xml. In time of creation we omit jsp-path, so fill it up now:

<jsp-path>/WEB-INF/pages/test/test.jsp</jsp-path>

Last thing to do is to put our shiny new component-type into page. In template we defined region, which is filled in page scope. That’s that components section in page config – /WEB-INF/pages/test/test.xml. It’s good idea to add some title and some styling like border and background thanks to chrome element:

Wondering about output to freemarker template from java backed webscript in Spring Surf? You’re on the right place, it’s simple so I’ll try to describe it on a few lines. For first I suppose some prerequisites you have:

Now we have to create our java source code. It’s not bad idea to put webscripts to their own package, for example webscript. In that package create a new class, which extends org.springframework.extensions.webscripts.AbstractWebScript – Example. By doing that we have to implement an execute method, which is called, when webscript is executed:

Last thing we have to do is to let Surf know about our shiny new webscript. You can add new bean directly inside applicationContext, but it’s not bad idea to keep them separately. So in src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/config create new Spring Bean Definition file – custom-webscripts-config.xml and put inside new bean definition:

It’s possible to login (if you have set up user factory) as an Alfresco user and after that another userId is shown. I’m planning to write new blogpost about custom user factory and stuff like that, so be patient please. Finally, you can download source code for this example at this link. Structure of project is shown at following screenshot (note that red dots – those are modified files):

Finally, try to experiment with some examples from Alfresco wiki and look forward to next blogpost.